Operation London Bridge: the death of the Queen

Well, here's the amazing track The Last Stand by The Aloof they played every half hour, which is an incredible piece of music...


There used to be about half an hour of the morning's broadcasting on YouTube, but I see it's been blocked, alas.



Well, they say that, but they chickened out halfway through the funeral and started showing it as well, at least for a bit.

This is the playlist Radio 1 used on the day Diana died.

The Aloof - The Last Stand
Nova Nova - Tones
Sacred Spirit - Culture Clash
After Life - Blue Bar
Pressure Drop - Dusk
Pat Metheny - Sueno Con Mexico
Sabres of Paradise - Haunted Dancehall
Ryuichi Sakamoto - Merry Xmas Mr Lawrence
Apollo 440 - Stealth Mass in FM
Giorgio Moroder - Love's Theme from Midnight E
Leftfield - Fanfare of Life
Nightmares on Wax - Nights Interlude

as reported in peter sissons's autobiography that diana m4 crash story

It is possible it was done twice, but the one I remember was Fergie, and was only a few months before the Diana crash.

At the time, Kiss FM in London had Patrick Forge and Gilles Peterson on back-to-back on Sunday nights. They went with a similar idea to Radio 1 - DJs not or barely speaking, lots of downtempo tracks. The following Sunday, Patrick Forge brightly announced that they'd had loads of requests to find out what the playlist that night was.

(I remember on the morning instinctively tuning to Capital FM to see if it was playing classical music - about the only thing I knew that'd definitively confirm the news wasn't a wind-up...)

London station XFM launched on the Monday morning after the event. That caused them to completely
rethink their first week's broadcasting !

And here's the first 45 minutes...

https://soundcloud.com/user-77846898/xfm-launch-1-september-1997-12noon-part-1

And the second 45 minutes - there's a news bulletin at 9 mins 14 seconds (Xfm used to do news at five minutes to the hour).

https://soundcloud.com/user-77846898/xfm-launch-1-september-1997-1245pm-130pm

Appears it was only blocked in the UK, so was able to convert it to MP3:

https://up.metropol247.co.uk/032017/1489750084_988396248.mp3 (18:33, 26 MB)



Video description:

Somebody at Radio 1 has claimed that something bad will have happened if this ends up being played. I find it a little more sinister than ambient, frankly. The violins make it feel like they're saying "The Queen has died... but who's next?"

That quote is taken from the Soundtracking 9/11 article published in 2011, by Chris Price. As the title would imply it's not about the death of Diana but about how Radio 1 and Chris Moyles handled September 11. Well worth a read if you haven't yet.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/christopher-price/soundtracking-911_b_957331.html

Their test transmissions were initially fairly minimal - ambient music or effects or something, but by that weekend they were running full tests of music and promos. They were pulled on the Sunday and it returned to the original ones for the day

Yeah. That first week pretty much went as planned - they had a load of promotional gigs booked too - with the exception of the test transmission and the dedication at the start. It was actually a relief to have something "normal" available on the radio.

The problem was, of course, that Diana's death robbed the station's launch of almost all media coverage, so it struggled to get attention and leaked money. The shareholders sold up to Capital within months, and that was that.